One rudder was freed and centred, and there it jammed, but even that was a major step forward: if the other could be freed, or even centred so as to eliminate its drag, there would still be hope, for the battleship could be steered by varying the relative speeds of the two great propeller shafts to overcome the contending forces of wind, wave and tide. But the rudder, buckled and twisted by the impact of the torpedo explosion, remained far over at its acute angle, immovably jammed.
The situation was desperate. Time was running out, and the engineers, haggard, exhausted men who had almost forgotten what sleep was, were now all but incapable of any effort at all, mental or physicaclass="underline" with the interminable plunging of the wildly rolling ship and the fumes of diesel oil seeping back from ruptured fuel tanks even the most experienced sailors among them were almost continually sick, many of them violently so.
It was announced that the man who succeeded in freeing the rudders would be awarded the Knight's Insignia of the Iron Cross — the highest award Germany can bestow. But there is no place for dreams of glory in the utter wretchedness of a seasick man, and even had a diver gone over the side into that black and gale-wracked sea he could have achieved nothing except his own death, and that in a matter of moments as the great ship, wallowing wickedly in the troughs, crushed the life out of him.
The engineer commander approached Captain Lindemann with a counsel of desperation — they should try to blow the rudder off with high explosive. Lindemann, who had had no sleep for six days and six nights replied with the massive indifference of one who has taken far too much and for whom nothing now remains. 'You may do what you like. I have finished with the BISMARCK.' These, surely, are the most tragic words that have ever been uttered by the commander of a naval vessel, but it is impossible to blame Captain Lindemann: in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion, he was no longer in contact with reality.
The order was given — it may have been by Admiral Lutjens himself — to get under way, and slowly the BISMARCK gathered speed until she was doing almost ten knots. With no steering control left, she yawed wildly from side to side, but her general course was north — towards the coast of England. This was the last thing Lutjens wanted, but there was no help for it: with the constant lifeless rolling in the great troughs, the turret crews had become so seasick that they were unable to fight their guns, and the ship itself had become a most unstable firing platform. More important still, a ship lying stopped in the water was a sitting target for any torpedo attacks that might be delivered in the darkness of the night.
And, inevitably, the torpedo attacks came. All night long the BISMARCK was harassed by a group of British destroyers, who, with their vastly superior speed and manoeuvrability, circled it like a pack of hounds waiting to bring down and finish off a wounded stag. But the BISMARCK, as the destroyers found, was not to be finished off so easily. Time and again, as a hound darts in to nip the stag, a destroyer raced in and loosed off its torpedoes, but soon discovered that this was an unprofitable and highly dangerous proceeding. Somehow, somewhere, the BISMARCK'S gun crews — and they were, after all, the pick of the German Navy — had found their last reserves of spirit and energy and drove off the British destroyers with heavy and extremely accurate radar-controlled fire from their 15-inch turrets.
During the running and intermittent battle, in the intervals between the crash of the gunfire and the momentary glaring illumination of the ship and sea around as the white and orange flames streaked from the mouths of the big barrels, a German naval officer, intent on boosting the morale of his men, kept up a commentary of the fight over the Tannoy system, 'One British destroyer hit… One hit and on fire… Ship blowing up and sinking…"
(In point of fact, none of Captain Vian's destroyers were hit, far less sunk, during the night. It is as well to remember, however, that all the inventiveness was not on the German side. The British destroyers claimed, a claim that was backed by the official Admiralty communique, that the BISMARCK had been torpedoed several times during the night: the truth is that the BISMARCK wasn't hit even once by a torpedo.)
Early on in the night, the Fuehrer himself sent a personal message to the BISMARCK: 'Our thoughts are with our victorious comrades' to which he received a reply, 'Ship completely unmanoeuvrable. Will fight to the last shell.'
It is difficult to imagine which of the two messages had the more dismaying effect. Probably the latter. For doomed men to be addressed as 'victorious comrades' is irony enough, but for Hitler to learn that all hope had been abandoned for the magnificent ship he had visited only a week or two previously and called the pride of the German Navy must have been a shattering blow.
As Lutjens said, the ship was completely unmanoeuvrable. The long dark night wore on, and in spite of every effort it proved impossible to bring the BISMARCK round on a course for Brest. For her own safety she had to keep moving, and with the set of the wind and the sea, there was only one way she could move — north.
Dawn was coming up now, a bleak, cheerless dawn with driving rain clouds and a grey and stormy sea. There was no longer any hiding from the crew the course they were steering, and the despair and the fear lay heavy over the BISMARCK. It was almost certainly to counteract this that an official message was passed round to the men at their stations — those who still fought off exhaustion and remained awake at their stations — that squadrons of Stukas had already taken off from Northern France, and that a tanker, tugs and escorting destroyers were steaming out to their aid. There was no word of truth in this. The Luftwaffe was grounded by the same high wind and low, gale-torn rain clouds as were sweeping across the BISMARCK, the tugs and tanker were still in Brest harbour and the destroyers never came.
There came instead the two most powerful battleships of the British Home Fleet, the RODNEY and the KING GEORGE V, beating up out of the west so as to have the BISMARCK between them and the lightening sky to the east. The men of the BISMARCK knew that there would be no escape this time, that the promised Stukas and destroyers and U-boats would never come, and that when the British battleships, bent on revenge for the sunken HOOD, finally turned for home again they would leave an empty sea behind them. The BISMARCK made ready to die.
Over the guns, by the great engines, in the magazines and fire-control rooms, exhausted men lay or sat by their posts, sunk in drugged uncaring sleep. On the bridge, according to the testimony of one of the few surviving officers, senior officers lay at their stations like dead men, the helmsman was stretched out by the useless wheel, of the Admiral or any member of his staff there was no sign. They had to be shaken and beaten out of the depths of their so desperately needed sleep, awakened to the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known: and, for all but a handful, it was their last awakening.
Even before they were all roused, closed up at their battle stations and ready to defend themselves, the RODNEY, no more than four minutes after she had first been sighted, opened up with her great 16-inch guns. For the waiting men on the BISMARCK, the spectacle of a full-scale broadside from the RODNEY, with her three massive triple turrets all ranged together on her tremendously long fore-deck and firing simultaneously as they did later in the battle, was an impressive and terrifying sight: but no more terrifying than the express train shriek of the approaching salvo, the flat thunderclaps of sound as the shells exploded on nearby contact with the water, the waterspouts erupting two hundred feet up into the leaden sky.